Rain gutters are used to convey water from one place to another. When used on buildings, rain gutters collect and divert water shed from the roof to designated locations. With rain gutters, water that flows off of a roof can be kept away from the building's base or diverted for collection in storage tanks.
Water is a relatively heavy substance to convey, but rain gutters are typically made of lightweight materials such as aluminum. Accordingly, rain gutter mounting should accommodate these characteristics. Moreover, rain gutters are useful for many types of buildings, yet buildings may have different roof configurations depending on the various contributions from roof material and fascia boards, for example, which can affect overhang, angle and depth. Rather than create custom gutters for each type of roof, brackets and adapters can be used to mount common rain gutters with varied roof types and configurations.
Many rain gutters are configured so that the roof-lacing side of the gutter should be perpendicular to the ground. Yet fascia sometimes hangs below the literal perimeter of the roof an insufficient distance to support the entire rear wall of a rain gutter and if the gutter is fully weighted with water, or the fascia is not perpendicular, the gutter can be bent downward by the water weight or there can be a gap between the gutter, and, the fascia. When bent, or poorly supported, a rain gutter will lose its effectiveness. Because the amount of this bend can be proportional to the amount of water conveyed, the gutter will lose effectiveness when it is most needed. Further, such deformation persists after the loading that caused the bend was applied.
The problem of gaps between a rain gutter and its fascia as well as minimization of water weight induced deformation can be ameliorated using gutter wedges. A gutter wedge prevents the gutter from bending towards the roof fascia when fully laden with water and it helps the gutter avoid deformation from water weight. However, prior gutter wedges required either complicated machining or expensive fabrication processes or imprecise measurements.
For example, a T-wedge is a type of gutter wedge made from a stiff extruded inelastic material with a protrusion that is difficult to fabricate and fashion to fit its application. They include a protrusion intended to fill the gap between the rain gutter and the fascia. Because this protrusion is substantially perpendicular to the rain gutter, it is necessarily not perpendicular to a fascia that made the use of a gutter wedge necessary. It is also expensive to fabricate. In order to account for different fascia and potential gutter deformation, a sufficiently large T-wedge must be purchased and then shortened to match the actual slant of the particular fascia.
Another type of gutter wedge is a triangle wedge. It may involve a single piece of metal that has been bent to form a hollow, right-angled, triangular prism with two open sides. The short side of the triangle and its hypotenuse are the open sides with the third and closed side being adjacent to the gutter. In theory, the hypotenuse is perfectly straight, parallel to a roof fascia, and in constant contact with the roof fascia. In practice, standard size triangles are purchased and then shortened to match the actual angle between the gutter and the roof fascia. Because an entire side must be cut, it is difficult to make this cut perfectly straight and precisely match the angle of the roof. Because the contact with the roof will be controlled by the highest points on the edge, the precise contact locations with the roof may not be knowable in advance. These contact points will be the sole resistance to lateral motion. This may cause additional problems in situations where the roof fascia is not uniform over the contact region.
Because of the problems associated with existing gutter wedges, there is a need for gutter wedges with improved performance, easier adjustability, and greater stability that can be fabricated at reasonable expense with readily managed materials.